


Souls' Day

by just_a_dram



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: All Souls' Day, F/M, Family Loss, Ghosts, Hope, Love Confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-31 02:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Souls’ Day, Sansa catches Jon performing a wildling ritual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Souls' Day

**Author's Note:**

> The notion for this fic comes from the old Scots tradition of opening the window or the door when someone dies, so that their spirit won't linger.
> 
> Written for the final day of Ghost Ships on gameofshipschallenges.

Though he is an ever present fixture in her life, playing the role of advisor and friend and other things for which she has no proper name, Jon never enters the Lady of Winterfell’s chambers without a knock and an answering ‘come in’ from her. Yet when she wanders into her chamber, which was her lady mother’s before her, in the middle of a cold, lonely afternoon, she finds him with his hands braced on the sill of an open window and the room frigid with the blast of the dying winter’s breeze. The corridor’s windows were open too, an oddity that drew her towards her chambers, wondering whether some negligent serving girl was at fault.

“Jon? Did you open these windows?”

“It’s Souls’ Day,” he says without turning to address her.

That’s a day she’s never heard spoken of before, so she ventures to ask, “Souls’ Day?” as she moves closer to him. The closer she gets, the colder it is, and she is forced to wrap her arms around herself to fight the shiver that threatens to jar her teeth. She glances around for Ghost, whose thick ruff is always a warm place to bury her hands, but he doesn’t seem to have followed Jon today.

“Or Shades’ Day or Spirits’ Day. It’s all the same, really. The day the free folk free the souls of those that have passed.” He looks over his shoulder, and after his eyes have dipped just below hers but never too low, he shrugs off his floor sweeping furs and drapes them over her narrower shoulders. They’re heavy and warm and smell of him. Sansa pulls them tight about herself and it’s like being encircled in his arms, as she watches him turn and sit on the sill. “You open the windows or the door or throw open the tent flap to let the spirits that linger go free.”

“Do all spirits linger?” Or just the troubled ones, she means to imply.

“I never thought to ask.”

“But you think we have spirits?” she asks, eyes darting to the open window behind him, through which they have supposedly been freed by Jon’s actions. He cocks one brow, as if her question needs no answer. Of course they have spirits. Dozens of them. She knows that; she only wants to hear him say it too. She relies on Jon to be her partner in such things—in mourning as much as in the business of living. “Even with half Winterfell’s walls missing?”

Her gentle teasing pulls something akin to a smile from him and he looks down at his feet, crossing one over the other. “Aye,” he says, sounding with that one word like the wildlings that fought at his side during the war with their soft, foreign lit and sometimes heavy burr. “Walls or no, it stands to reason they’d be too stubborn to leave, some of them being Starks.”

Starks and those that faithfully served them to the end, sacrificed for purposes Sansa will never understand, despite her better grasp of the game and its cruelties. The thought of the dead causes a different kind of chill, and she tucks her chin into the furs, breathing deeply to soothe the flicker of pain she feels at the icy touch of such memories.

When last she was in Jon’s arms before he reappeared to her, they were children and she was attempting to teach him how to dance. Then he was her half brother, her bastard brother, different from the rest. But when he came to her in the Vale and enveloped her in his long arms, he was so very familiar even in his new, male form that lacked the ungainliness of youth. Struck by how much he reminded her of her father, even the smell of him brought back a rush of recollections that drew tears she could normally control as easily as one rights a pitcher to stop its pour. He’d brushed them away with his calloused thumbs, as softly as though she was still a child safe in her parents’ care. That was familiar too.

The furs are soft against her cheek and she breathes again, as contentedness quiets the sore ache of loss. It’s the smell of furs and leather and earth. Something northern too, like the sharpness of a juniper forest. When she smells it lately, she thinks only of Jon, the present slowly creepy like a vine over the bones of the past.

“Not just stubborn. They’re sometimes rather noisome for spirits.”

He’s right. She hears their voices raised at times loud enough to startle and their heavy footfalls echoing through empty halls. Sometimes it’s almost as if they brush by her in the corridors in a rasp of wool against wool. She’s never spoken a word of it to anyone—even Jon to whom she tells most things, save the emotions that she is not proud of that well up from the darkest corners of her soul.

“You hear them too? Our brothers…” she pauses, thinking of fierce little Arya, who by now would be a woman grown, but she won’t add her name to the list. She refuses to think that her sister isn’t alive somewhere as more than a furtive rumor, which means she couldn’t be here amongst the dead, floating incorporeally. “My parents?”

 “Yes, I hear them.”

“Yes,” she repeats, taking a half step towards him until her skirts brush the tips of his scuffed, black leather boots. “It’s not so bad is it? Hearing them?”

“No,” he says, but she hears the uncertainty in his voice and sees the way his body stiffens, rejecting deceit of any kind.

Jon is not a born liar and even when he speaks a half truth, she can see through the thin ruse. It’s one of the things that puts her so at ease around him. He is not at ease, however, and she has an urge to lift her hands to his face and press her forehead to his to reassure him, so that the furrow between his brows disappears, but it takes at least one hand to hold Jon’s fur closed. Words must suffice.

“But you want them gone?”

She’s torn, feeling haunted but strangely comforted by their presence—or at least accustomed to it after all these moons spent in the shell of their home. She’s as accustomed to them as she is to Jon, who she selfishly begged to stay at her side three moons passed, though he is a prince and could no doubt do more, be more, have more, should he leave Winterfell for the capital. At the very least he could find a wife, but here amongst the ruins of Winterfell there are few women worthy of a Targaryen prince. The very thought of it though, Jon going away, marrying some southron girl, and never seeing him again, makes it hard for her to breathe. The threat of it keeps her awake at night as much as nightmares of monsters and men.

“I think they must go. For their own sakes.”

Gentle Jon, worrying about the fate of the dead, as much as he concerns himself about the smallfolk and servants and bannermen to whom he feels responsible in spite of his not being the lord of Winterfell. “So they will be at peace, you mean.”

“Yes, but I opened the windows for us too. Or we’ll be forever trapped in the past. Unless that’s the way you want it.”

Sansa’s not sure opening the windows will make much of a difference, when they live in a castle that itself is nothing but an artifact. They are immured in the past, but it’s the life they’ve both chosen. It’s the life she thought they both wanted. Perhaps she was wrong. Her heart begins to beat too quick and she wishes Ghost was nearby to bestow her attention upon, so as to put a stop to this conversation.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?” he asks, and his solemn grey eyes fix on her.

Something about their intensity drives the shiver Jon’s furs have held at bay up her spine and she spins, putting her back to him, anything to avoid the depth of his stare.

“I thought we were…” she stammers, unable to finish her own thought, for they are not happy precisely, but she is also more at home here with Jon than she has felt since she left Winterfell for King’s Landing. She feels safe, and that’s no small thing after all the time she spent living in fear. If there are other things she sometimes wants, it’s nothing compared to being sure of him and sure of herself. She is Sansa Stark here, daughter of Eddard and Catelyn Stark, and while Jon is no longer her brother, she knows him too, better than she ever imagined she would.

Jon’s hand closes on her shoulder. She can’t feel the strong bones of his hand through the thick fur, but she knows the shape of them. It’s usually she that seeks out their comfort, her hand slipping into his and knitting their fingers together as they sit before the hearth or make the walk to the godswood. What is unusual is for Jon to initiate such touch. He is more guarded, respectfully keeping his distance.

“Don’t be angry,” he says, and as he does, she realizes she is—irrationally and unexpectedly, because they’re never cross with each other, not truly, and he’s done nothing wrong—but it feels as if her blood is heating hot enough to rival his fiery Targaryen blood. “I only have the nerve to say it the once, and I had to send our entire family out the window to manage it, but I won’t bother you with it again if you tell me no. I won’t sulk and make you sorry for having heard me out either. I swear it.”

She missed it, having decided that she would never marry, shuttering away the female part of herself that longed to be touched and loved, and pretended that Jon too was an untouchable thing, unmoved by the desires of men, but she hears it now in his voice—the needfulness that is undeniably male, and she wonders how often he’s shown it, how poorly he no doubt hid it, while she willfully looked the other way.

She turns back, one hand clutching the furs and one lifted to seize his quilted doublet, so that she might beg him not to say it, beg him not to leave her for some nameless woman. To beg won’t be dignified and her pride will sting from it later, but she can’t let him go, she’ll shatter if he does like the melting icicles that clatter to the ground beneath the eaves when the noon day sun manages to break through the watery grey clouds of winter. But as her fingers twist, looking for purchase against the coarse wool, he reaches up to stroke her hair and his fingers catch and pull, drawing her gaze up. What she sees there is not the face of a man asking permission to leave her for another. The black of his pupils stare fixedly at her lips, the way she has told herself she doesn’t need and would never want to be looked at. But this is Jon and she finds herself wanting. Gods, how she wants.

She rocks into him, letting his hand cradle the back of her head as his mouth closes over her own. Just the top, gently, unrushed, until he shifts, and takes her lower lip between his. She allowed it, encouraged it with her movement towards him, but the touch of his lips—warm and full—against her own is still a shock that makes her hum high in the back of her throat and her fingers scramble. It has been so long that she almost doesn’t know how to respond, and the thought that this is Jon keeps creeping to the front of her mind, making her lips move slowly and uncertainly.

“Wait, wait,” she pants, and he dutifully stills, kisses the corner of her mouth and drags his beard against the smooth of her cheek before pulling back completely, letting his hands return to his sides, where the right closes in a reflexive fist. A soft sigh is the only real sign of his disappointment and even that he cuts off before his chest has fully deflated.

She immediately regrets stopping him, not only because her body thrills towards him, wanting to feel the press of his lips in other places—her jaw, her ear, her neck, her breast, and the back of her knee—but also because he looks down at her as if he awaits some command, when she has none to give. She inwardly shouts at herself to say or do something, but Petyr taught her to never speak without carefully weighing her words and some lessons are hard to unlearn.

Finally, he breaks the silence that has made her cheeks go pink at her inability to compose herself along with the thought of his hot mouth engaged elsewhere. “I won’t go away if you refuse me. I’ll stay as long as you need me. That won’t change.”

“Refuse you? Have you asked me something?” she asks, withdrawing her hand from his chest to cover her breast, which will not stop its embarrassingly quick rise and fall.

“No, but I meant to,” he says, clearing his throat. “I’m asking you to marry me. Rather poorly, I suppose, but that’s my intention.”

It isn’t the most eloquent offer of marriage, but then, though married twice, she’s never actually been asked before, and so it is certainly the best she has ever received.

“Oh.” It’s all she can manage. An answer would be good, for she can see from the way Jon’s jaw muscles jump that he is in rather acute misery, but all her mind can fix upon is how Jon Snow, who was raised here as her brother, has in the space of five minutes thrown open the windows of her mother’s chambers, kissed her, and asked her to marry him. “You think my mother would disapprove?”

She hates how small and uncertain her voice sounds, when she has spent so much energy on crafting herself into a lady to whom people turn to for answers, someone who seems sure and confident, but she can’t keep the quiver from her voice, when her mother’s disapproval suddenly seems a frightening thing. Her mother wouldn’t have approved of either of her husbands, but then, Sansa had very little say in the matter. Now she’s being asked to choose and she feels all of five namedays old, needing her mother’s permission to grasp the thing offered to her. That her mother might refuse, turns Sansa’s stomach, and she can’t begin to work out why that would be, when she’s never thought to want this, let alone imagined it might be something Jon would offer.

“I…I suspect all of our family would disapprove,” he says, his mouth becoming a hard line.

“All of them?”

Doing anything that might displease her lord father does not sound like Jon. He was always the most eager out of all of them to please, trying to make up for the misfortune of his birth.

“Yes, but they’re dead.” It’s a harsher truth than she’s used to hearing from him. Jon is generally careful with her, tender in a way he might have been with her when they were children if she wasn’t too busy plotting her future to pay him any mind. If he acted thus because he thought her weak, she would resent his careful manner, but that isn’t it at all. At first it stemmed from brotherly guilt over not having been there to protect her and then gradually it came from true affection. What kind of affection, she has never had reason to question. Until now. “And I’d rather they not have a say. Let this be between us two.”

It’s no wonder he treats her like a spooked filly, because even as she agrees to consider his offer without reference to the past, giving him an eager nod, she blinks back salty tears. Opening the windows may have done no good, for it feels as if a host of eyes look upon them, silently judging.

“Are you all right, my dear?”

The endearment isn’t new. Not quite. He says it sometimes at the end of a long night, when their goodbyes seem to drag on before the dying embers of her chamber’s fire, but the tone of it as he says it now echoes through her, and she wonders whether he always said it with this underlying devotion. How blind and deaf has she been? The dead might not understand what she and Jon need, because they no longer engage with the living, but that doesn’t mean she need live as one of them, frozen in place.

“I’m sorry,” she says, waving a hand before her eyes, attempting to dry the tears that threaten to spill forth.

“I’ve startled you, coming here unannounced.”

“Unannounced?” Sansa asks on a hiccup of a laugh. As if his impudence in coming uninvited is the cause of her emotions running high.

“You need time. There’s no need for you to decide immediately. I’ll keep. I’ve had a great deal of time to think on this…”

He looks as if he might flee the room, as if apologies and excuses sit on the tip of his tongue. His weight moves over his toes and his brows pull down in a frown that on anyone else she would think fearsome, but is nothing more than self doubt. She doesn’t want him to go just yet, doesn’t want his confidence to lag, so she interrupts, her fingertips grazing one elbow, urging him, “Tell me then, what you thought.” His right hand closes over her own, trapping her hand against his arm, and the soft sweep of his thumb over the back of her hand makes her bite her lip. Careful, thoughtful, Jon Snow. His thoughts on this will be her anchor, the way they have been for moons, helping guide her management of Winterfell and its people. “Help me understand.”

“You wouldn’t have to leave Winterfell if we married. You could stay forever, and still…have your heir.”

Beside her reluctance to bind herself to any man, since they have shown little kindness to her, Sansa has given no thought to the prospect of marriage, precisely because it would take her from her home. There is sense in his logic, and yet, she feels a twinge of disappointment at this rational explanation for his offer. It is what she asked for—his thoughts—but it is his feelings she finds herself wanting laid open. He kissed her as if he had more than a rational interest in the Stark line, but it could be her romantic notions, childish fantasies, causing her to misinterpret a gentle kiss, looking for love that is not there, not in the form in which she seeks it out. It wasn’t enough to be wanted for her title, her lands, the North, but what he offers might not be enough either.

“You could give me an heir,” she echoes flatly back.

“Presumably,” he says, letting loose of her to scrub his face with his scar roughened hand, his eyes trained on some spot several inches to the right of her ear, as he turns a dull shade of red. _Presumably_. If his seed takes root in her empty womb. She swallows thickly, as a picture of Jon above her, between her legs, his face flushed with effort and passion, pushing her into the soft feathers of her mattress tick with every sure thrust comes unbidden to her mind. It’s a picture so clear, so distinct that she can’t help but think it has been sharpened in her dreams, playing out whilst she slept. It makes more than her cheeks feel hot. “I always imagined you wanted children.”

“I did.” She blinks up at him, and the old dream of children, who look like Robb and Bran and Rickon and Arya, filling up Winterfell with the pounding of real, not bodiless feet over stones, their high voices raised in play, imposes itself over Jon’s solemn face. Their children would look like that— grey eyes set in narrow faces topped with dark hair or crowned in ginger curls. Crowned in cold, hard gold too. “They’d be heirs to the throne,” she says, as her stomach swoops at the thought of their imagined children sent to King’s Landing, the way she and Arya once went to the capital.

“Behind Aegon and Aegon’s children.” True. It was unlikely their children would be required to go south, but it’s a prospect that makes her knees feel weak. “I know that’s not what you want. I’d do anything to prevent it. What you want is foremost to me.”

An unbelievable statement from anyone else but her Jon, but she can trust him to speak only the truth to her. He is the first person she learned to trust after so long. He must know that. He might even think that it is his duty to give her what she wants—the family, a lord husband, children to sit at her skirts—when she is so broken that she can only abide his company.

“Is it merely to appease me then, that you make your offer?”

“No.” She raises her brows, silently asking him to continue, for her voice unexpectedly fails her, and he crosses his arms over himself, lowering his chin in towards his chest, looking as if he prepares himself for a confession of considerable weight. “I’m in love with you.”

Though it is awkwardly made, his voice rough and his eyes directed at the floor, it is the admission the girl inside of her longs for, she realizes, as warmth floods her chest and her mouth quirks a little triumphantly. “Then, you have a very odd way of making love to a woman, speaking of heirs and geographic suitability.”

“I’m not one for words.”

“Is that why you kissed me?” she asks, stepping back into him and rubbing her thumb against his chest over where his heart thrums fast.

“I kissed you, because I’ve wanted to kiss you for moons.”

“Then kiss me again,” she says, slipping her hand up to wind in the curls that overlay the stiff neck of the doublet and drag him back down. Just to be sure.

They aren’t quite of the same height, though she is tall for a woman, but he only has to tilt his head down the slightest bit to fit his mouth to hers once more. Only a shift of feet to bring their bodies flush together, her breasts flattening against his solid chest, his hip bones pressing against her through her heavy, winter gown. Only a nip of his teeth to have her lips part and his tongue brush hers. They’re all the smallest of movements, and yet, in their unexpected intimacy, Sansa feels as if she is falling from the tallest height, as unfettered and robbed of air as those who went wide eyed through the Moon Door, legs and arms akimbo. Kissing and intimacy of any kind always felt like something to be endured, except for on those rare occasions when she was able to forget who she was and pretend, losing herself in a mummer’s act in which she was the main player. Here in Jon’s arms, she is painfully aware of who they both are. In no small part because he whispers her name against her kiss moistened lips.

“Sansa. Gods, Sansa.”

Yes, I’m sure, she thinks, as she pulls back to breathe, smiles, and rests her head against his shoulder, though she would have more of him, of them, of this delicious revelation. Love is pain, but the head swirling, chest pounding kind of pain, not the pain of those that will hurt you. This is the good kind of pain. The kind worth enduring even if you risk losing it to death or war or the vagaries of fate and end up hurting all the more. It’s worth letting the spirits that have given you strange comfort go free, so that you might embrace the future that can only be shared by the living.

His hand cups the back of her head, and it’s warm and big enough that it makes her feel small and safe. “I’ll devote myself to your happiness if you allow it.”

He says he has no talent for words, but those sound very fine to her.

“I will.”

His hand tightens against her skull. “Yes?”

She’s been blind to it and called it something else, so she could live with what she thought the limits of their relationship were, but it has been there for some time, blooming in her chest, unfurling in her blood. She isn’t blind anymore.

“Yes, please.”


End file.
